Introductions 2020

Introductions 2020 was presented at Root Division, San Francisco, in September 2020 as part of the 2nd Saturday Exhibition Series.

EXHIBITION DATES : August 19 – September 24, 2020

JURORS : Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo Artist/Curator Deborah Munk Artist In Residency Program Manager, Recology Anton Stuebner Associate Director, Catharine Clark Gallery

EXHIBITING ARTISTS : Joseph Abbati Cristine Blanco Dance Doyle Lauren Finch dani lopez* Midori Nathalie O’Brien Beril Or Julio Rodriguez Nancy Sayavong Ebtihal Shedid Joshua David SoIís Ramírez* *Root Division Studio Artist

Detail image: Nancy Sayavong Untitled (Spanish Interior), 2020 Sculpture 77.5 x 28 in.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 09

Foreword by Michelle Mansour

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From the Jurors: Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Deborah Munk, Anton Stuebner

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Resets and Recoveries

by Renée Rhodes

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Joseph Abbati

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Cristine Blanco

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Dance Doyle

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Lauren Finch

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dani lopez

26 Midori 28

Nathalie O’Brien

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Beril Or

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Julio Rodriguez

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Nancy Sayavong

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Ebtihal Shedid

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Joshua David SoIís Ramírez

FOREWORD

MICHELLE MANSOUR Executive Director, Root Division

Introductions has been a core part of Root Division’s annual Exhibitions programming since 2007. Conceived as an opportunity to bridge a gap left when the San Francisco Arts Dealer Association (SFADA) discontinued their 30-year summer programming of the same name, Introductions has become a mainstay of our roster. This show highlights talent in the Bay Area and creates connections for artists with commercial galleries and beyond.

Root Division acts as a nexus for the production and presentation of visual art. Our goal is to serve as a connector between artists, the larger art community, and the general public. We offer an entry point for artists as they develop and hone their professional practice. Especially as the art community has faced an exodus of artists moving outside San Francisco and to other cities in search of a more sustainable life AND with the reverberation of the hit to the city’s most financially unstable populations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Root Division is holding course in its position as an anchor for artists to remain in the Bay Area. Celebrating our fifth year in our 13,000 square foot facility and over 17 years as an arts organization, Root Division continues to be a beacon for the visual arts in our city, especially amidst so much challenge and uncertainty.

Introductions begins each year as an open call to any Bay Area artist whose work is not currently represented by a local gallery. Reviewed by a committee of three arts professionals representing a diversity of commercial, non-profit, and educational venues, the exposure for any submitting artist is invaluable. Each year we are encouraged and impressed by the quality of submissions, and we are surprised by the number of outstanding artists still operating under the radar of commercial representation. Our intent is to capture both the aesthetic and conceptual magic that comes from cultivating this new crop of artists.

This year our jurors — Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo (Independent Artist/ Curator), Deborah Munk (Artist In Residency Program Manager, Recology), and Anton Stuebner (Associate Director, Catharine Clark Gallery) selected twelve artists through intensive review. In these pages, you will find an essay by Renée Rhodes (Root Division’s Art Programs Manager) contextualizing the work of each artist and bringing the works into conversation with one another as well as within a larger discourse of art practice. Root Division is happy to provide an opportunity for these twelve artists to add to the conversation of contemporary Bay Area art, especially in assertion that the San Francisco art community has a unique voice. We are proud to debut this group of artists and to support their continued artistic and professional development.

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FROM THE JURORS

LUKAZA BRANFMAN-VERISSIMO Artist/ Curator

•DEBORAH MUNK Artist In Residency Program Manager, Recology

It is amazing to be a part of a community of artists and culture makers that always seem to keep going, keep fighting, keep imagining a more equitable and just world. Introductions 2020 shows resilience, force, care, strength, for this moment. These twelve artists reveal themselves, their practices, while also asking us what the role is that artists must play during global struggles and fighting for liberation.

While galleries and arts organizations explore new approaches to presenting artists’ work during the COVID-19 pandemic, artists struggle more than ever to have their work seen. For the arts professional, even the most familiar responsibilities such as curating a show, installing and hosting an exhibition, and even studio visits, have become rather complicated, and the virtual learning curve has proven to be steep for some.

It takes imagination and perseverance to design virtual programming that supports an artist’s vision, sustains the viewer’s attention, and is accessible to many. Bravo to the team at Root Division, who despite the recent challenges, are forging ahead in this new hybrid environment so they can continue to give voice to emerging artists.

The content driven work in Introductions 2020 is rooted in current issues ranging from the political environment and climate change to loved ones lost, drug and alcohol abuse, identity in relation to race and gender, queer positive representation, displacement, collective memories, and the meaning of home. The work is presented in a variety of mediums including, painting, installation, photography and video and varies from large expressive pieces to smaller more subtle documentation.

It was an honor to be a juror and learn more about the artists and their work. I remain hopeful for the Bay Area arts community, even with all of our challenges, because of organizations like Root Division that continue to provide a much-needed platform for artists who have the ability to drive cultural change and raise awareness. Congratulations to the extremely talented group of twelve emerging artists chosen for Introductions 2020.

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•ANTON STUEBNER Associate Director, Catharine Clark Gallery

Each year, Root Division’s Introductions show presents audiences with an important “state of the field” survey of contemporary practices in the Bay Area. The social context from which the 2020 edition emerged, however, forced us to ask fundamental questions about what it means to create in a time of reckoning, and the ethics of doing so as BIPOC and queer lives are threatened by police, economic, and institutional violence.

The public health conditions of COVID-19 required us to disperse and isolate, to encounter one another through proxies, and to engage with the world around us at a distance. At the same time, assembly became an even more necessary means of political protest and action, even as our access to shared and communal spaces seemed increasingly precarious through policing and public policy. We collectively asked questions about how to protect one another and how to hold space for vulnerable populations. At the core of this, we also confronted scholar Judith Butler’s exhortation for us all to consider “when is life grievable?” The answer — again via Butler — is once we recognize that bodies — and Black lives — do matter.

Introductions 2020 presents twelve outstanding artists whose work invites dialogue on addiction, economic displacement, environmental collapse, homelessness, immigration, labor, and mourning rituals. The projects on view – both online and in real time and space — encourage serious reflection on lived experiences that are all-too-often elided or erased by a white, cisgendered hegemony. There is also extraordinary joy throughout and powerful celebrations of Black lives, queer bodies, activist histories, and high camp. In short, this is work that — in every sense of the word — matters.

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RESETS AND RECOVERIES

RENEE RHODES Art Programs Manager, Root Division

Introductions is a yearly Root Division offering that showcases the work of twelve emerging Bay Area artists, who are cultivating their strengths as storytellers and visionaries. This year has been a rough one (you know: global pandemics, an ever precarious economy, continued displays of police violence and systemic violence against BIPOC communities.) But this year is also a transformative time — old entrenched ways fray at the seams and other ways might seem a little more possible. They don’t have to be new ways, but perhaps, just ways that are full of life, gentleness, reflection, care, and the vibrancy that emerges with a collective walk-out on traumatic systems.

Artists are good for this job, as always. They deal in transformational tactics and reflections that build empathy. I see the twelve artists in this year’s 2020 edition of Introductions as savvy storytellers of our current world, as well as humble visionaries for a future one.

Throughout the exhibition a thematic triplet emerges, something like remembrance, rebuilding, and recovery, which sounds potentially cheesy, like something from a community-help pamphlet which might emerge after a crisis or natural disaster. Of course we are in crisis — and so I’d definitely welcome artists as co-writers of this hypothetical document.

Introductions 2020 brings us personalized memorializations and remembrances of the socially invisible, from censored sexualities to lost loved ones, to the liminal states inhabited by immigrants and diasporic communities. A collection of contemporary textiles and soft sculptures is also present, which in their own way, explore sexuality, social positioning, or a joyful claiming of counter norms. Alongside these soft forms we also see vibrant and playful paintings which, through the lens of portraiture, reclaim agency for people and their stories less heard.

Through many of the sculptural works in the show we see trends of dismantling and rebuilding architectural and public spaces — spaces that act as proxies for the socio-cultural attitudes embedded within. Works following this trend explore performative actions of rebuilding, reenacting, and reclaiming familiar spaces and architectures for art, familial heritages, rest, climate resilience, and the counter narratives of queer culture. A general tone emerges throughout the show of: Take it apart. Prop it up.

Improvise beautifully. Adaptive strategies are seen here as self-given tools of agency in an uncertain future.

Another current running through, nods to the body itself, as vulnerable, magic sites in need of recovery. This thread realizes itself though portraiture, performance, and sculptures that toggle back and forth between replaying the embodied traumas (as a method of recovery) and hopeful suggestions for rest and healing.

This exhibition is one of our favorite ways to support emerging Bay Area artists at Root Division. Throughout this very hard year, we are encouraged and relieved that creativity persists and that the sharing of stories is still alive. Throughout this exhibition, the artists lead by example, elevating the healing potential of art-making itself. As well, each artist here knowingly builds empathetic pathways out of the well worn ruts our culture has traveled in so far.

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DANCE DOYLE

The vivid tapestries of act as vehicles for storytelling, imbued with personal memory and carefully tended craft. Her works are bright, they glitter and shine. There is something of camp aesthetics in their boldness, but the tales rendered are serious and sincere as Doyle stitches and weaves together a visual journal of her personal struggles with homelessness and addiction. Doyle cites the aesthetics and cultural position of growing up in Oakland in the 1980’s as a major influence. Her forms and style have a freedom and play to them, which she credits to her self taught background. Her works leave us feeling an empowering sense of agency as personal stories are woven and reclaimed.

Also sharing in the lineage of pop-forward contemporary textiles, are a series of new weavings, soft sculptures, and textile pieces by

DANI LOPEZ. Her weaving and fiber sculpture works straddle a line between personal storytelling and broader queer social histories.

Through devoted practices like weaving, sewing, and embroidery, lopez stills and memorializes fleeting moments and scenes; a hook up gone awry, a rejection, lipstick stains on a napkin, a landmark lesbian bar lost to gentrification. Her banners and flags, flopped and falling, signify the party is over or maybe it hasn’t quite started. Within her forms a campy fun is embedded in every stitch, while a fearful failure lurks beneath the surface — a tension which acts in response to her own closeted queer youth while weaving a larger mythos and aesthetic for queer femmes.

Similarly sharing in concerns over visibility and body-positive

JOSEPH ABBATI

celebration is and works from his new series Queeries. Abbati’s paintings focus on gay male pleasure, gaze, and desire. He is interested in the ways that social standards (on social media especially) pressure queer men to censor themselves to fit into heteronormative expectations. His works act as an archive of the censored, but they are also just plain fun in their approach. His bright, pop-art styled paintings have a screen printed poster-like quality to them, with a clear linear quality and bright solid blocks of color. His titles and imagery deal up witty puns and visual jokes through which we can see how much Abbati revels in humor and levity — mobilizing them as clever tools to be thrown in the face of oppressive (and likely more boring) forces.

Remembrance is a driving force in Fashionable Death, a photographic

LAUREN FINCH

series by . Her work in this social documentary photography series explores the bond between the living and the dead in the East Bay of California. Through straight portraiture she carefully documents friends, neighbors, and family members wearing custom-made shirts that memorialize loved ones who have recently passed. These works archive loss and the ephemerality of a life. They also share the trend of making shirts and memorabilia as Finch says “to provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living to

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prolongate the terror of forgetting.” Her stark images are a portrait of a community, while also an archive of a subtle subculture of mourning.

MIDORI

InVocation by is a large-scale installation also imbued with a sense of collective memory and ritualized memorialization. In this installation work a striking vertical column is woven together by hemp rope, of the sort typically used in the Japanese bondage form called Shibari. Midori sees this sculptural meshwork as a site of transformation and the in-between, referencing the backstages, changing rooms, and club bathrooms where queer sex workers prepare and transform into their performative work personas. Midori also points to Japanese animist traditions which honor the spirit of non-sentient objects (like sewing needles and hairbrushes) that support everyday human living. With InVocation Midori honors the object and spirit of the retired Shibari rope and other toys (donated by current or former sex workers) as a precious representation of the emotional and physical labor of the queer sex workers that used them.

Also exploring themes of transformation and visibility, is the work of

JULIO RODRIGUEZ. His public space paintings ruminate on visibility and blending in the public sphere and wonder at the presumed neutrality of the cityscapes he inhabits. His works are a series of highly ephemeral and site-specific paintings, documented through photography and video. In much of his work, the artist himself dons a hi-vis orange vest as he paints grey and white abstractions onto city surfaces. Through the familiar urban ritual and aesthetics of high visibility personal protective garb and bland brushstrokes on city walls (the sort that acts as a “neutral” graffiti cover up,) Rodriguez is assumed an “official,” and can make his subtle public interventions in peace. His paintings can exist anywhere, and now he has us wondering if it is his original work that we are seeing under each BART overpass and “cleaned” up office facade. Through his process and outcomes he is able to both blend and disappear.

A subtle through line weaves through the exhibition and can be seen

EBTIHAL SHEDID’S

again in photographic series. Shedid explores her own experience inhabiting liminal spaces and encountering the daily in-betweenness of her life as an immigrant. Having grown up in Egypt, Shedid recounts that all of her memories are inscribed upon that land and that place. Her life in the United States is a chosen one, but this place with its comparative gender equity is not the home of her memories. The place feels flat and her experience within it, at times, dissociative. Through photography, she is able to record simple daily gestures that are rooted in memory, repetition, and an attempt to recreate a continuity of experience for herself.

Repetition and re-enactment also feature prominently in the sculptural

CRISTINE BLANCO

and photographic works of . Often inspired by her grandmother’s home in the Philippines and concerned by climate injustices and resource precarity, Blanco explores the impact of rising sea levels and creates adaptive strategies that re-imagine the family living room as a site of mashup. Sentimental furnishings are propped up by the pragmatism of canned foods, operating as stilts that elevate the dining room table above the floodwaters. We can almost imagine carrying on this way. The old and the new, the well crafted and the provisionally improvised are juxtaposed and create a hybrid formalism that speaks both to remembering Blanco’s familial migrations, as well as to survival strategies that will be necessary parts of navigating a changing climate.

Props, dissections, and deconstructions of home lay the foundation

NANCY SAYAVONG’S

for sculptural practice. Her architectural interventions are explorations of materiality and confirmations of how our built world is created. By uncovering what lies behind the drywall, she imagines an understanding of the embedded psychological spaces shaped by other architectures: those of cultural belief, written history, and social movements. What social habits inhabit private spaces and how does form inspire behavior? How does a home act to house trauma? Sayavong herself occupies a layered space: working as a professional custom architectural builder, as a daughter of workingclass Laotian refugees, and as a queer body disguised within these normative realms. Her domestic de-constructions and additions wonder about spiritual and cultural morale and strategic property ownership — both so often connected to patterns of domination and control.

JOSHUA DAVID SOLIS RAMIREZ too explores the body in and against systems of power — performing acts of efficiency and order that come apart and fail when the body itself breaks down or embraces its inherent vulnerability. His interdisciplinary works realize themselves through performances for video, sculptures, installations, sound recordings, and photography. Simple actions reveal their impossibility.

He builds roads that lead to nowhere in the desert scrub; walks and gets stuck in the sticky mudflats of the SF Bay with the glittering yet unattainable skyline of San Francisco looking on; he documents his attempts at simple breathing during his own struggle with contracting COVID-19. The background story for much of his work explores themes of belonging and exclusion centering on his childhood experience of migrating back and forth between the United States and Mexico. His works wonder at the dangling carrot of the American dream and the fraying seams of its mythologized exceptionalism. In search of meaning, safety and opportunity Solis’s works ask, in his own words: “Where is home?” “What better life?” and “Where do I belong?”

BERIL OR by contrast, creates sculptures that suggest the body in rest, asserting that rest itself as a political act of self-recovery and care. Her works track and respond to the political situation in her home country of Turkey and acknowledge the physical and emotional impact that political strain has on people’s lives. Through the creation of sculptural spaces, she suggests personal bubbles of rest, recovery and retreat as coping mechanisms. Sleep has become her oeuvre and area of research. Her works wonder at how sleep holds a dualism that at once helps people heal, as well as hide, from painful traumas and political absurdity. Inspired by this dualism and tension Or uses everyday objects — like pillows and blankets which meet harder more restless materials such as concrete, fluorescent lighting, and poured lead — that respond to Turkish healing rituals. Her works conjure rest, but also a sense of the domestic and personal in tension with the cold minimalism of a systematic order and rationality.

NATHALIE O’BRIEN

Lastly, brings us a ray of optimism and alluring agency through her acrylic and gouache paintings that center Black subjects in beautifully adorned interiors. With a style inspired by the Bay Area Figurative Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and a true sense of care for her subjects, O’Brien gently explores identity, race and gender. Her portraits are figurative and everyday, yet imbued with a magical realism of sorts: a woman sits calmly by a window in moonlight; a couple’s heads have been subsumed by glowing orbs of light; a starry patterned wallpaper lines a room. Her figures and the environments they inhabit offer reflections of her process, which begins with a collage sketch — assembled from magazine imagery and scrap fabric. This collage-time she conjures leaves us placed here, there, then and now. The fashions and furnishings in O’Brien’s scenes make blurry boundaries of time — placing us either in the pastseeking present or perhaps, her works are portals into pasts tinged with a hopeful futurism.

We are pleased to share this work from twelve emerging artists and to honor the critical importance of storytellers — those that do our collective remembering, that imagine social rebuilding, and that insist on radical modes of recovery.

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From top to bottom, left to right: Basket Balls, 2018 Basketball hoop, net, and balls 20 x 28 x 18 in.

Foot Soldier, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 24 x 1.5 in.

Circle Jerk, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 30 in. tondo

Tongue, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 16 x 16 x 1.5 in.

Bare Back, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 30 in. tondo

Big Boy, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 24 x 1.5 in.

Joseph Abbati 17

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From left to right: Side Table, 2020 Wooden table, concrete, artificial flowers, glass jar, and house paint on archival inkjet paper Dimensions variable Wooden Bench, 2020 Wooden bench, four plastic step stools, expired canned goods from mom’s garage: canned pineapple, hominy, diced tomato, sweet potato, pears, peaches, pumpkin, corn kernels, vienna sausages, and spray paint 40 x 42 x 28 in.

Store Front, 2020 House paint on archival inkjet paper 56 x 43 in.

Residential Status, 2020 Video, HD quality, edition of 5 8 minutes

Cristine Blanco 19

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From left to right: The Witness, 2019 Mixed media tapestry 80 x 29 in.

Six Feet High, 2019 Mixed media tapestry 104 x 36 in.

3am, 2019 Mixed media tapestry 101 x 37 in.

Dance Doyle 21

From left to right: Aunt, 2018 Medium format photograph 12 x 12 in.

Boyfriend, 2017 Medium format photograph 12 x 12 in.

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From left to right: Brother, 2017 Medium format photograph 12 x 12 in.

Mom, Grandma, 2018 Medium format photograph 12 x 12 in.

Lauren Finch 23

hot mess, 2019 Faux fur fabric, satin lining, zipper, faux alligator, cotton, tulle, pleather, crepon, thread, trim Dimensions variable alone... , 2019 Machine sewn and hand-embroidered cotton, interfacing Dimensions variable BDE, 2019 Handwoven cotton and acrylic yarn 64 x 10 in. for donna g., 2019 Handwoven cotton yarn 53 x 24 in. pressed lavender, 2018 Handwoven crochet thread, machine sewn and hand sewn tulle and crepon, embroidery floss 28 x 31 in.

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dani lopez 25

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InVocation, 2019-2020 Mixed media (Hemp rope. totemic objects donated from current and former sex workers) 144 x 96 x 96 in.

Midori 27

From left to right: Moonlight, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 18 in.

Untitled (Red), 2019 Acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 in.

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From left to right: Man in Chair, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 20 in.

Untitled, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 16 in.

Nathalie O’Brien 29

From left to right:

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Untitled // From Sleep Series, 2019 Pillows, fluorescent lights Dimensions variable

Part of a ritual I /a, 2020 Lead on a photo 27.5 x 23.5 in.

Part of a ritual II, 2020 Lead on a flat screen Dimensions variable

Part of a ritual I /b, 2020 Lead on a photo 27.5 x 23.5 in.

Part of a ritual III, 2020 Lead 8 x 7 x 5 in.

Beril Or 31

From left to right: Thinking Out Loud (video still), 2020 Single-channel video 12:18 minutes Blending (video still), 2016-18 Single-channel video 4:45 minutes

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Thinking Out Loud (video still), 2020 Single-channel video 12:18 minutes

Julio Rodriguez 33

Untitled (Spanish Interior), 2020 Sculpture 77.5 x 28 x 9 in.

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Peep Show, 2019 Photograph 8 x 10 in.

Rip (documentation of installation), 2020 Photograph 8 x 10 in. [photograph of] Untitled (Spanish Interior), 2020 Photograph 11 x 14 in.

Nancy Sayavong 35

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From left to right: Sehnsucht I, 2019/2020 9 archival pigment prints and pins 57 x 39 in.

Sehnsucht II, 2019/2020 9 archival pigment prints and pins 57 x 39 in.

Mourning self portrait, 2019/2020 27 archival pigment prints and pins 57 x 39 in.

Ebtihal Shedid 37

From left to right: En la tierra de los sueños | In The Land Of The Dreams, 2020 Digital video 3:15 minutes

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Historia de un verano | A Story Of A Summer, 2020 Digital video 6:00 minutes

Hacia tierras en donde aún se sueña | Unto Lands Where Dreams Still Happen, 2017 Digital video 26:33 minutes

Still image from: En la tierra de los sueĂąos | In The Land Of The Dreams, 2020 Digital video 3:15 minutes

Joshua david Solis ramirez 39

STAFF Michelle Mansour RenĂŠe Rhodes

Michael Gabrielle

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Executive Director

Michael Nguyen

Art Programs Manager

Phi Tran

Communications & Design Manager

ChiChai Mateo

Development & Programs Assistant

Carissa Diaz

Phi Tran

Education Programs Manager Installations & Site Manager

EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION

Graham Holoch

ABOUT ROOT DIVISION

SUPPORTERS

Root Division is a visual arts non-profit in San Francisco that connects creativity and community through a dynamic ecosystem of arts education, exhibitions, and studios. Root Division’s mission is to empower artists, foster community service, inspire youth, and enrich the Bay Area through engagement in the visual arts.

The organization is a launching pad for artists, a stepping-stone for educators and students, and a bridge for the general public to become involved in the arts.

Root Division is supported in part by a plethora of individual donors and by grants from National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission: Community Investments, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Kimball Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, Fleishhacker Foundation, Violet World Foundation, Deutsche Bank Foundation, Wells Fargo Foundation, and Bill Graham Memorial Fund.

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